ARTtwo50

Rumor has it that the mother of all online print purveyors is set for a relaunch. 20×200’s Founder and AFC friend Jen Bekman has hinted over twitter that her company may launch soon, though an exact date has not yet been given.

There is a hidden promise built into the act of making a photograph, particularly with portraiture. A hint of salvation, as if the camera can act as a portal to a better place. This would obviously be more pronounced in places like prisons, conflict zones or psychiatric hospitals but even on the street we were bewildered when people agreed. At about the time this doubt started creeping in we both read a remarkable book by Janet Malcolm called “The Journalist and the Murderer,” where she wonders incredulously why anyone would reveal so much to a journalist, in her experience often more than she felt they would reveal to a shrink. We began to feel the same about images. Why would anyone agree to being photographed without a full understanding of the potential political, cultural and economic currency of the images. That eco-system, the moral, political and financial world that images work in began to interest us more than the individual images. So our work began to look at revealing the mechanisms at work around image making, distribution and consumption. Its hard to do this if you’re just making pictures which for the most part leaves you at the bottom of this powerful food chain. [CPHmag via: Greg.org]

Another start-up that wants to put more art on people’s walls. ARTtwo50 is an iPad app that allows users to picture what a work would look like over their couch or above their bed. Once the customer has chosen the art work, ARTtwo50 will “demystify” the pricing structure of the art world by pricing all the art on the site $250. [TechCrunch]

Richard Phillips has come up with a rescue plan for Detroit: Detroit Basel. [Twitter]

Is the art work critical of capitalism on display at the Goldsmith’s MFA show actually complicit with it? “A Letter to Goldsmiths art students on capitalism, art and pseudo-critique” [Prolapsarian via Bad at Sports]

The West is recognizing bizarre, old Japanese porn as art. Japan is not as keen on the idea. [Bloomberg]